Can i.MX53 support mulitiple decoder more than 4 instances?

Hello, we are working on a NVR like project with i.MX53, we want to decode 8 or 16 H.264 streams from external devices like IPCamera or USB camera (with H.264 video encoder inside), for the multiple video preview, we want to live view a combined big image by using 8 or 16 QCIF small images which are decode from H.264 stream. But I found in VPU spec that it can only handle 4 decode instances synchronically, it means that i can only decode 4 h.264 stream at same time, so i can only connet 4 external devices. For the performance, I think it's easy for i.MX53's VPU to handle 16 QCIF bitstream decoding, 16CIF's resolution is only a D1 (720x576). Maybe the restriction of max 4 decode instances is due to the firmware of BIT 16 bit DSP. All of the h.264 stream are from same H.264 video encoder, so I think the BIT don't need reload the decode code frequently, it will save some performance and context set switching bandwidth.

Do you have some BIT firmware which can handle more decode instances than 4 with api of vpu_DecOpen()?

We are working on the i.MX53 for 4 months, and if i.MX53 can not handle this, how about i.MX6?

This has been tested on QSB with 1024x768 @ 16 bpp screen decoding / resizing videos up to vga (remove sound track and have your videos at correct size if possible), above you will meet VPU / memory bandwith limitations sooner or later.

First, we did not succeed with your gstream example on our QSB, does it have any other dependency?

Second, we don't want to use gstream for decoding, we just want to run it in our own application. Gstream is too complex for us to implemented, mxc_vpu_test is good example for multi-decoding, but we found we get many errors with it.

For mxc_vpu_test, it should decode 2 files at same time, we use it as follow: